If you’re anything like past versions of myself, then you’ve likely spent years perfecting the art of controlled eating, perhaps while simultaneously navigating a myriad of symptoms that you’re trying to resolve through said controlled eating.
And for women like myself, many of these symptoms never seem to go away, regardless of how “clean,” healthy, or intentional we actually eat!
In fact, our symptomology often only gets more complicated over time, despite our intentional diets and various restrictions.
Maybe you’ve been taking all the “right” supplements, have cut out foods or entire food groups, learned to read labels, cook most of your meals from scratch, or you’ve spent years trying different ways of eating in pursuit of better health.
Maybe — like myself before I switched careers and began studying nutrition science — you’ve become someone others look to for nutrition advice, despite having no official training, because of how much thought and effort you’ve needed to put into feeding yourself each day.
But you still struggle with unremitting symptoms that food restrictions and healthy dieting haven’t been able to fully resolve. You’ll try something new and feel better for a while, only to eventually have your old symptoms — whether it be with your digestion, sleep energy, skin, or monthly cycle — crop back up and start to take over your daily experience again.
And as far as that complicated symptomology I mentioned goes, you may find yourself:
- waking up exhausted, hours before your alarm, feeling like you’ve been hit by a bus despite having done everything “right” the day before.
- feeling anxious and fatigued at the same time, somehow wanting nothing more than to rest during the day while finding it difficult to truly settle into rest at night.
- having developed more and more food intolerances over time, leaving even the foods you’ve considered healthy to feel threatening to your hyper-vigilant system.
Your periods, which may never have been easy to begin with, may have become increasingly painful, or your libido has gone down or become inconsistent.
Your digestion — which has also become more finicky as you’ve gotten older — has begun to feel quite random in what will trigger IBS symptoms since you react to so so many things.
Maybe you’ve begun wondering whether you’ll be able to get pregnant at all (if this is a priority) because so many other things are already challenging in your daily health.
For many women with paths similar to my own, these experiences create a confusing paradox; we’ve spent years trying so very hard to be healthier and to eat well, only to feel increasingly more fragile in our own bodies, and in our daily lives.
We begin to experience ourselves as having high-maintenance constitutions, where nothing we do is quite enough to feel like wellness could ever become effortless. And the smallest of stressors—whether dietary, relational, or habitual—seem to carry outsized consequences because our overall stress tolerance has become so darn low.
And here’s the thing: I don’t think this is simply an issue of poor discipline, a lack of willpower, bad luck, inheriting bad genes, or even necessarily some hidden diagnosis waiting to be uncovered — although these things may all play some contributing role. But increasingly, I suspect that many modern women—particularly women who are health-oriented, conscientious, perfectionistic, and accustomed to overriding their own needs—have unknowingly become chronically undernourished.
We’ve normalized under-eating. And believe me, this isn’t always obvious.
Many of us have adapted remarkably well to functioning in states of energetic scarcity. We’ve learned to rely upon stress hormones to carry us through the day when our actual cellular energy is chronically low, and we may have habituated speeding up as a form of self-proctection…oftentimes, without any awareness we even do this at all!
And because running on stress hormones will inevitably decrease our appetites, and can actually feel quite good for a while, under-eating doesn’t necessarily register as a problem earlier in life for many of us.
In fact, under-eating & running on stress hormones can feel productive, it can feel virtuous, and it can even feel healthy!
Until it doesn’t.
At some point, many of us seem to cross an invisible threshold where our bodies can no longer compensate in the same ways for this malnourishment. Our sleep worsens, our monthly cycles become irregular, painful, or disappear entirely, food intolerances creep in, and we’re suddenly only able to eat a handful of foods without digestive problems.
The natural impulse (and the protocol given by SO many practitioners and clinicians) is to cut out the “problematic” foods, and adopt one restrictive diet or another.
But for those of us who’ve tried this approach (usually countless times), the success we have is usually short-lived. And as we grow older, we often find that our original symptoms start creeping back in and bring some friends with them.
One common pattern I’ve encountered with clients countless times (that I experienced myself) is being on a restrictive diet out of fear of triggering symptoms… while simultaneously living with daily symptoms! Many times this can go on so long that we won’t even be able to tell what causes our symptoms and what doesn’t because our symptoms are our new normal.
And many of the foods we’re avoiding have become off-limits for so long that we may not even be able to tell how they actually impact our health now, in the present moment.
In these kinds of circumstances, fertility can become more elusive, if it wasn’t already, because we’re too busy focused on upstream issues such as sleeping through the night, digesting even the most basic of meals, and having enough energy to go to work.
We may also find that we catch every cold and flue that’s going around because our immune system is under-resourced, and we become more reactive to otherwise benign environmental triggers that can make life feel less controlled. We may start self-diagnosing with things like histamine intolerance, gluten intolerance, mold toxicity, parasites, or MCAS before we’ve ever had any testing to verify things.
Truthfully, many of us are struggling with some of these issues, which do, indeed, increase our sensitivities to a whole host of triggers.
For those of us with these kinds of story arcs, being a modern adult can feel like walking through quicksand. And we’re often taught, even in holistic health circles, that all of these issues are separate and deserving of their own protocols, their own complicated diets.
But I increasingly think that chronic under-eating may be one of the quieter epidemics affecting women today, driving a lot of their other issues.
And while this may be particularly true for women who already focus extensively on their health and thus under-eat for health-related reasons, this also applies to women who are simply too busy to notice how much proper nourishment is being undervalued and de-prioritized in their lives.
In this article, I’d like to explore why under-eating has become so normalized, why so many women don’t recognize it in themselves, more about these two types of women (health conscious under-eaters and busy distracted under-eaters), and I’ll break down the three strategies I apply while helping women rebuild nourishment as a foundation for metabolic resilience, hormonal health, and, of course, fertility.
Let’s look at my strategies!
Strategy #1: Taking an Honest Look at What Energy We’re Asking Our Body to Run On
The first place I tend to begin in my client work is surprisingly simple: we look at a woman’s energy story, through her health history, lifestyle, current diet, a woman’s HTMA and other lab results.
This isn’t because I believe food tracking and lab work is inherently therapeutic (for most of us it’s a pain in the ass) or because it’s the only metrics we’ll be working with (my direct experience of her somatically in our sessions will tell me a lot).
It also isn’t because I think every woman should spend the rest of her life calculating macros and health metrics (unless your goal is to become more neurotic!)
Rather, I think many women have become so accustomed to eating in ways that are subtly inadequate for their bodies and their busy lifestyles that they genuinely don’t recognize how often they’re under-eating, stressed out, and missing key nutrients each day.
Most women I work with don’t intentionally deprive themselves of basic resources; they’re conscientious and they care deeply about their health. Many of them have spent years investing time, money, and energy into eating well and trying to understand what will help them feel, look, and function better. And yet, when we actually begin documenting their intake—whether through a few days in Chronometer or simply writing meals down in a notebook—patterns often emerge that neither of us were aware of.
And more often than not, she’s not eating enough of the right stuff to fuel her metabolism and bring her body back into balance — especially after years of disruptions and stress.
Maybe she’s eating only twice per day because coffee suppresses her appetite in the morning and work carries her through lunchtime. Or maybe she’s consuming plenty of nutrient-dense foods, but very little overall energy because her GI reactions to carbs have naturally drifted her farther into some intentional version of low-carb. (pro-tip: our energy comes from our CARBS!)
Perhaps she’s eating what appears to be a balanced diet, except that her overall caloric intake is just too damn low for a breastfeeding mother of three, a busy exec working 50 hours a week, or a woman with very high stress due to trauma or circumstances. These circumstances may all be quite different, but each of them places a greater demand on a woman’s body for more nutrients, more energy.
Maybe her protein intake is insufficient to maintain muscle mass, fertility, or adequate blood sugar stability — suuuuuch a common pattern I see in women!
Or perhaps she’s unintentionally relying on dietary fat as her primary fuel source because years of toxic wellness messaging convinced her that carbs were: inflammatory, addictive, making her fat, giving her diabetes, or somehow just vaguely incompatible with good health.
I’ve seen all of these patterns countless times over the years in hundreds of different women — patterns that I’ve emulated myself at various points — and none of them, I mean none, brought me a sustainable path to true wellness.
Because dietary restrictions (I’m talking restricting healthy whole foods and food groups, not processed crap) is only ever a bandaid approach, but never a true path to wellness.
Sometimes – many times – women discover that they’re simply eating far less than they thought they were on any given day, for no clear reason at all other than maybe low appetite, busyness, or poor planning.
Or it can be that stress makes each day a little different, where sometimes we’re getting enough and sometimes we’re not. This inconsistency will have our brain constantly scrambling to try and ensure we do have enough since it never knows when the next “famine” might strike!
And this scrambling feeling to get enough calories can become the nervous system state by which we live our entire lives.
In my coaching work, I’ve had clients who realized they’re going six or seven hours without food because they simply don’t feel hungry, and may even be doing this intentionally because “intermittent fasting” is said to be so healthy. And this, to me, is where things become particularly frustrating because health culture memes themselves are often perpetuating female stress patterns and malnourishment.
Although I exist in a bubble on social media myself, mainly surrounded by women taking a similar nourishment-based approach to my own, there are still entire wings of TickTock and Instagram where health influencers are giving millions of women advice around how to eat less in the name of health — demonizing certain nutritious foods. And I guarantee you, it will slowly wreak havoc on women’s health over time.
An example: I had a recent client who came to work with me after piecing together random general protocols — predominantly created by men — she found on the TickTock wellness space.
When I saw the foods comprising her current diet, they seemed completely random and even disruptive to me for someone with gut issues as challenging as hers. When I asked her WHY she chose these particular foods and methods of eating them, she told me that she got the general recommendations off TickTock.
This (male) influencer she was following suggested that she focus on carbs only in the second half of the day, to eat only within a short time window (intermittent fasting), and to focus specifically on higher fiber intake.
Since this was general advice, he wasn’t speaking to her individual needs, but I found his advice to be horrible, even generally!
If you’re a small woman with blood sugar issues, severe IBS symptoms, and low energy… restricting carbs, eating windows, and overall macros is going to create stress alongside whatever immediate symptom remission you might experience.
The fact that she was having some relief from her symptoms through eating this way, while at the same time, still suffering daily with symptoms…creates almost like a game of slots with how we approaches our health.
This illustrates two things to me, simultaneously, about what can happen when we follow generalized advice gleaned from social media influencers: we can have some relief from our symptoms through applying random things we piece together from the internet — which may or may not be helping us toward our ultimate health goals at all — AND we can also struggle to track our own patterns when this is our approach.
When we’re doing it all alone and following generalized advice while in a state of information overload, we can easily form beliefs about what’s “working” and what’s not that may be leading us astray over time.
And if we try enough stuff, eventually something will help us feel better for a little while. Here are a few of the random things myself and many of my clients have thrown at the wall in a desperate attempt to feel better when we didn’t understand the root cause of our issues:
- Random enzymes that may or may not be addressing our digestive needs
- Random probiotics that may or may not be making it into the intestine or helping us with our dysbiosis or infection
- Random mineral supplements that may or may not be used well by the body, that we may not even need
- Random superfoods sold as panaceas for all kinds of issues, such as colostrum, collagen peptides, amino acid supplements, detox support compounds, anti-aging supplements
- Anything that we’re taking because some stranger sold us on it and spoke to our desperation and pain
Before ANY of these kinds of things should be considered, we first want to look at:
- our overall nutritional intake
- our overall caloric intake
- our daily appetite
We want to assess our basic energy foundations that can tell us what we may need in place BEFORE we start adding in random things that we have no verifiable evidence will help us.
When we don’t have the foundations down — when a woman is chronically under-eating, her body doesn’t simply lose weight — it starts triaging survival. Her metabolic rate drops as the body down-regulates thyroid conversion (T4 to T3), lowers body temperature, and slows digestion. All of this happens in an autonomic effort to conserve precious energy in the face of perceived scarcity.
This isn’t a malfunction; it’s an adaptation based around survival. Because under-eating is a matter of survival.
The cost of this adaptation is that the body can no longer rely on steady, efficient energy production — the kind that comes from a well-fed thyroid and healthy ATP output. Instead, it shifts to running on stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which can mobilize quick energy in a pinch, but were never meant to be our primary fuel source.
Over time, this pattern creates a body that feels “wired but tired,” anxious, and increasingly dependent on stress to function — because stress, not nourishment, has become its main source of get-up-and-go.
The longer this goes on, the more distorted our appetite signals can become.
And I don’t necessarily view appetite as a static biological phenomenon that simply tells us when we need food anymore; now I understand that appetite is deeply shaped by context.
Appetite responds to stress, trauma, circadian rhythms, social connection, hormonal signals, and the environments in which we live.
Most of us are living in a culture that rewards us in some way for overriding our bodily needs, and we’re also given scripts for how we should eat that offer us more of the same. This is, essentially, what diet culture is: various scripts for overriding our bodily signals for the sake of some vanity metric or visual outcome, such as lower numbers on a scale or a different body composition that may or may not be healthy for us.
Here are some patterns that I’ve seen a lot in my work:
- We rush out the door with coffee in hand, having skipped breakfast.
- We often have no appetite in the morning because our cortisol is already high by the time we’ve gotten up!
- We eat protein bars in between meetings.
- We pride ourselves on productivity and food comes last.
- We work through lunch, rarely eating a meal without a screen to distract us.
- We have normalized sympathetic dominance and we call this ambition or success.
- We feed our families first and feed ourselves last.
- We snack or binge on junk or snack foods in between meals or in the evening to make up the difference and bring our cortisol back down.
- We eat in isolation and, therefore, we eat while in a lonely or distracted state, leading to under-eating or overeating to make up for the social aspect that’s absent.
As I observe us trying to fit eating into our already busy lifestyles, as if it’s an afterthought, I find myself asking: What happened to slow eating, to intentional food prep, and to the kinds of nourishment that sustained life for us throughout so much of human history?
And, more importantly, what happened to women’s roles in all of this?
We have a lot more freedom as a result of the industrial revolution taking away all of the hard labor we had to do around food and eating… but what has this left us with when it comes to true nourishment now that it’s all been outsourced and de-prioritized?
Asking these kinds of questions is what I do in my work – not just of individuals, but of the larger culture itself, although we do all need some individual accountability for our own choices if we wish to improve things.
And of course, I’m definitely not implying that women’s place is only in the kitchen.
But I am pointing out that liberating ourselves from the kitchen almost entirely has led to the creation of a culture that tries to fit nourishment into the tiny pockets of our busy modern lives. This shows up in our health, and then we wonder why health isn’t effortless for us.
For women who’ve spent years dieting, pursuing aesthetic goals, adhering to restrictive wellness trends, or navigating eating disorders…the relationship to our hunger signals can become even more complicated and confusing.
Hunger cues can and often do quiet over time, and appetite suppression can begin to feel normal if we’ve been under-eating for years.
As previously mentioned, functioning on stress hormones can feel productive, motivating, and even enjoyable, especially as it becomes more familiar and the body prioritizes that familiar buzz. But eventually the body reaches a point where it can no longer sustain that adaptation, which was my own personal story.
This is where burnout often kicks in and our feel-good metabolic-regulatory chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, thyroid, and progesterone all plummet, and we generally begin to feel like shit “for no reason.”
Of course, there is a legitimate reason, even if the cascade of adaptations makes it hard to track over time — and that underlying reason tends to be directly related to inadequate fuel.
And the low energy states that follow inadequate fuel.
This is why I find it helpful to gather objective information before making assumptions about what’s driving a woman’s symptoms. We look at caloric intake, meal timing, macronutrient distribution, mineral status, health history, menstrual history, sleep, mood, energy patterns, exercise tolerance, food fears, and past dieting experiences. All of this forms a greater picture of a woman’s overall nutrient status and energy levels.
And instead of asking, “What’s wrong with my body?” we begin asking a different question:
Has my body simply been trying to do far too much with far too little for far too long?
Again, this was the arc of my own story; too much demand on too little nourishment for far too long that eventually led to all kinds of health issues stemming from the same malnourishment pattern.
Being a “health nut” for over half of my life didn’t save me from this pattern, and in fact, probably made it worse over time!
For many women, this shift in focus from control & convenience to basic nourishment, alone, can be profoundly relieving because, before we invest in dozens of labs out of pocket, we can master the art of self-nourishment and simply eat more nutrient-dense foods throughout the day.
If our symptoms are, at least in part, the consequences of an under-resourced system, then the path forward will involve considerably more nourishing foods and more energy support.
Sometimes the solutions to our health issues aren’t actually the most complex solutions, but are the simplest ones we’ve been avoiding due to the personal accountability personal change requires of us.
Eating more isn’t something that anyone else can do for us — we cannot outsource this process to a pill, a practitioner, or a treatment — it’s truly up to us each day to ensure we have enough in our system.
Strategy #2: Create a Life That Actually Supports Proper Nourishment
Once we’ve established that a woman may not be eating enough, the next question becomes much less about nutritional knowledge and much more about logistics, environment, and personal capacity.
Because the reality is that most women, especially the ones following my work, often already know that they should be eating more regularly.
Deep down, most women know eating breakfast regularly will help them feel better, and they know skipping meals probably isn’t ideal for their health. THEY FEEL IT.
Women I work with already know protein is important because every health influencer on the internet seems to be talking about it. But knowing what will help, and having a lifestyle and habits that reliably support doing what will help… are often two very different things.
One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that many women have built lives that are incredibly good at supporting productivity, caregiving, and meeting external obligations. But these same lifestyles are often surprisingly poor at supporting their own nourishment or responding consistently to their own bodily signals. Again, I know this from personal experience as I am historically one of these women.
In the work I do with C-PTSD, we refer to this act of listening and responding appropriately to our bodies’ needs and signals as attunement.
If we didn’t have this need met by our care providers during our developmental years, it can be harder to recognize and meet this need ourselves as adults, and we’re more likely to set our lifestyles up to justify mis-attunement.
Example: “ I cannot go to bed earlier to balance my circadian rhythms because I have too much to do for my work or my family,” says the woman who is chronically under-rested and burnt out, getting trapped in helpless states regularly as a result.
This doesn’t always imply trauma because we can all experience mis-attunement, but if it’s an issue for you, then food can simply become another thing to fit into an already full day, and is much more likely to be the thing that gets crowded out when life gets busy.
If we don’t intentionally design our lifestyle around regular nourishment, under-eating often becomes the path of least resistance.
Of course, this can also happen with resting, moving our bodies, remaining hydrated, or anything that requires attunement.
But the fuel (i.e. food) piece is definitely the most important!
For women who live alone, under-eating may show up differently than it would if she was feeding her family or feeding a partner.
Single women often underestimate how much food they’ll actually need, thus shop for only a few days at a time, eat through what they bought more quickly than anticipated, and suddenly find themselves staring into a nearly empty fridge wondering what they’re going to eat. I know I’ve certainly experienced versions of this myself as a single woman, even as a professional health coach!
There have been periods in my own life where I was too tired at the end of the day to cook, too underprepared to assemble anything satisfying, so I became habituated to making do with minimal effort, and snacking throughout the day began to masquerade as eating actual meals.
I don’t necessarily think this is a matter of discipline for a lot of us; I think nourishment requires infrastructure.
Nourishment requires having enough food in the house, and having foods available that don’t demand a great deal of executive functioning if that’s something we already struggle with. Pro tip: if you’re busy and you know you have limited energy, then extending out excessive energy, time, and focus on eating may be an unrealistic expectation to set for yourself — may be best to keep things simple and just focus on just having enough macros in the fridge and pantry.
And perhaps more than anything, eating enough asks us to confront a difficult question: Have we built lives that genuinely assume we deserve to be well-fed and that this should be a priority?
In my sessions with my clients, we discuss:
- Schedules and how our schedules influence our appetites & choices.
- Shopping rhythms, where and when we shop, and why.
- Cooking capacity, storage space, and habits in the kitchen.
- Family dynamics and demands.
- Energy availability and what might make the most sense for nourishment
- Decision fatigue and how to streamline nourishment & cut perfectionism.Convenience foods and when to use them and cut corners.
- Budgets and money issues.
We also discuss all of the practical realities that either support nourishment or quietly undermine it before we’ve even cooked a meal or taken a bite.
If eating enough is going to become sustainable, I don’t think it can depend on motivation alone – it has to become embedded within the architecture of a woman’s everyday life.
And sometimes that means realizing that feeding ourselves adequately may require just as much intentionality as we’ve spent giving to our careers, relationships, and even to raising our children.
Just the act of eating well each day could be something we place great intention into, and this alone could move mountains for us.
I believe a big obstacle to prioritizing this level of nourishment is the fact that we live in a culture that doesn’t immediately reward nourishment, but actually makes it more expensive – from the actual cost of nutrient-dense foods to the time we spend shopping, preparing, cooking, and eating that could be spent doing other things that bring in money and validation.
From this lens, nourishment is often taught to be viewed as a luxury experience and an indulgence, instead of a basic need.
Unfortunately, avoiding nourishment also becomes expensive too though, as so many women have come to realize when they invest in my services after losing some aspect of basic health.
The solution in this strategy is to make food shopping, preparation, and consumption a key feature of your lifestyle, regardless of what else you have going on. This can take some time as you work to habituate new schedules, new habits, new priorities, and work toward letting others go.
But believe me when I saw that the investment in your basic health is always worth it!
Strategy # 3: Pay Attention to What Gets Revealed When You Begin Taking Nourishment Seriously
One of the most interesting things I’ve observed about increasing food intake is that it often tells us far more about ourselves than we initially expected.
At first glance, eating enough each day can seem like a fairly straightforward goal. If we establish an appropriate caloric range, aim for balanced macronutrients, and work toward greater consistency, it can appear as though the primary challenge will simply be remembering to eat. And sometimes it is truly this simple for us.
But in my experience, this is often where the deeper work begins for women.
Because once we begin making nourishment a priority, many of the reasons we’ve struggled to nourish ourselves adequately suddenly start to reveal themselves.
For some women, particularly mothers, they realize they’ve spent years organizing their days around feeding everyone else first & downplaying their own needs. They know exactly what their children prefer, what snacks are running low, and what needs to be packed for school lunches, yet when it comes to themselves, they discover they’ve been surviving on leftovers, grazing throughout the day, or eating whatever happens to be available once everyone else gets fed.
And again, for women who live alone, such as myself, the barriers look different.
Sometimes we underestimate how much food we’ll need when shopping; we buy for the version of ourselves we’d like to be rather than the reality of our appetites, schedules, and actual energy needs. We run through our groceries more quickly than anticipated and end up under-eating simply because we’ve normalized making do with less in the home.
Other times, we realize we’ve become profoundly tired and food just isn’t a priority. This can be especially common for busy women who eat the same thing all the time or have been restricting for digestive reasons (which is a vicious cycle that never ends), and suddenly we find that food just doesn’t motivate us as we wish it did.
If we’re working, caring for others, managing responsibilities, exercising, pursuing goals, and navigating a demanding modern life — all on potentially little fuel — then by the end of the day, we don’t necessarily want to shop, food prep, and cook a nourishing meal on top of all this.
We’re likely to be exhausted by decision-making, tired of eating the same foods, and craving things like novelty, convenience, or simply comfort and dissociation. This is often when we order takeout or when we sit in front of the tv with chips and ice cream.
I’ve had several women share with me that at the height of their burnout, going grocery shopping was one of the most overwhelming tasks for them, partially due to the energy involved in the entire food acquisition process itself.
I’ve also found that, living along the California coast, healthy food is simply not cheap!
I’ve never been one to complain about the expense of things, as it just never felt like a healthy lens through which to live, but it’s become an unavoidable concern for a lot of the women I speak with. We all want to eat well and to prioritize this, yet it can begin to feel very stressful if you’re finally buying enough food for what your metabolic health actually needs, only to realize how much this is going to cost you each month!
Since we also cannot live in depletion, this is where we look at ways to cut prices without cutting the nutrients our bodies so desperately need–a process I regularly help me clients with.
For some of us, we’ll want to assess where money might be going that might be better served going towards nourishing food. This can be a frustrating process, but it’s also an important statement we’re making to ourselves about our values and our priorities in life.
There are also obstacles that surface that feel less logistical and more relational in nature.
One of the biggest obstacles I experience in women is the fear and, oftentimes, the lived experience, of increasing food intake that leads to weight gain.
If you’ve been managing your weight and body composition through stress hormones and calorie deficits for years – potentially your entire adulthood – then your body is going to require an adjustment period to use food well & not store it as extra fat.
Sometimes this adjustment period can bring up a lot for a woman psycho-emotionally, as it often confronts long-held beliefs about discipline, attractiveness, morality, or what it means to be a “healthy” woman, even at different sizes.
One big obstacle that I’ve faced myself as I began eating more was beginning to notice that receiving nourishment itself felt unfamiliar, and potentially unsafe.
Beginning in my pre-teen years, I’d become accustomed to lumping foods and the way they left me feeling into categories of “heavy” and “light.”
I’ve seen a lot of this reflected back to me from the women in my community who have a history of extreme diets such as veganism, raw foods, fruitarianism, and restrictive eating for “cleansing” or spiritual purposes.
From this lens, we view foods that are lighter as inherently more healthy, cleaner, and potentially more spiritual or pure.
This experience of lightness is one that we can become addicted to. These foods tend to be overall lower in calories, lower fat, and lower in things like bio-available proteins, therefore, they take less metabolic energy to digest, and we tend to burn through them much faster. They also keep us fairly ungrounded and can lead to dissociative states over time if not balanced with more dense meals.
Foods that leave us feeling heavy, we often associate with being unclean, weighed down, toxic, and bigger in size. For some of us, this also includes the basic feeling of being full.
These “heavier” foods tend to ground us, trigger satiety hormones, and involve more concentrated carbohydrates, animal fats, and proteins. They can also be harder to digest for those of us with low internal resources if we’ve been malnourished for a long time and have stress responses to the experience of fullness itself.
If we’re under-eating in an attempt to remain “light, clean, and pure” then we’re also likely to have low stomach acid, low enzymes, low nutrient status, and an overall lowered tolerance for the foods that will most nourish, satiate, and ground us.
It can become a vicious cycle where we eat for to attain this experience of lightness, which we become accustomed to, our digestive resources go down, we don’t feel well when we eat heavier foods, and thus we feel validated through our actual experiences, which are, of course, being misinterpreted through a distorted lens of health.
If this is a framework through which a woman views healthy eating, her body will begin to tolerate less and less food over time as her energy adaptations familiarize her more with the lightheaded, ungrounded feeling often associated with spiritual states.
This is a clear path to disorderly eating and a body that rejects all foods and normalizes eating itself for essential survival resources, while a woman keeps herself small.
This unfortunate path has a strong social component to it, as restrictive eating can be a very tribal experience when it’s approached through a moral and ideological framework. This is especially potent when it involves social pressure and personal identity attached to it.
I’ve seen this play out in just about every dietary camp I’ve participated in: veganism, paleo, keto — any dietary camp with a moral, historical, or cultural narrative defending it’s validity as the “best” approach to human nutrition.
For many of us, under-eating developed alongside years of chronic stress or environments in which our needs were repeatedly deprioritized and unmet.
Over time, becoming highly functional with very little sustenance can start to feel like an accomplishment and even comfortable because of it’s familiarity for us, even though it may and often does come at the expense of our vitality down the line. Truthfully, women stuck in survival mode aren’t geared toward vitality.
I increasingly think that many of our symptoms make sense when viewed through this lens of stress adaptations.
Under-eating often isn’t laziness, ignorance, or necessarily a lack of discipline. More often, it seems to reflect the ways we’ve learned to survive within cultures, family units, relationships, and nervous systems that have rewarded self-sacrifice, productivity, sympathetic states, body size control, and the act of overriding basic bodily signals.
This is one reason I appreciate taking a trauma-informed approach in my professional work as a nutritionist.
Eating enough isn’t always only about adding calories, specific nutrients, or foods in; sometimes it’s about learning how to tolerate having needs in the first place and having to learn, as adults, to meet these needs ourselves.
Sometimes it’s about grieving the years spent disconnected from hunger and fullness or from having to navigate these experiences at a young age when we needed the adults around us to manage these essentials for us.
I’ve had the experience countless times over the years of feeling frustrated that I have to feed myself AGAIN.
I already ate, yet here I am a few hours later, needing to feed myself yet again, and without anyone else’s help. If this seems like a childish frustration, it’s because it is. In my family, my siblings and I were neglected early in life and we had to learn how to feed ourselves long before it was an ideal thing to prioritize developmentally.
I now know that the experience I went through early in life is unfortunately common, setting many women up to feel burnt out with basic things like feeding themselves as adults. And even if we weren’t neglected and we had adults cooking for us until we went away to college, it’s actually quite a new phenomenon for humans to plan, cook, and eat all their meals alone! If it feels overwhelming and exhausting, its probably because it often is!
We can feel like we’re the sole responsibility for our survival when, historically, this was always a familial and communal endeavor for humans – never an isolated task to do alone, for and by ourselves.
From this angle, it makes sense why so many of us would be avoiding it or de-prioritizing daily nourishment as modern women. Again, it’s an adaptation to our modern place and time to under-eat (without a legit famine or food scarcity driving this!) But even viewing this pattern as an adaptation doesn’t let us off the hook from the accountability necessary to begin nourishing ourselves fully.
Sometimes our obstacles to nourishment are about discovering that our bodies are asking for something remarkably simple: enough energy, enough consistency, and enough safety to stop relying on stress physiology to carry us through life. But even if this is a simple ask, it’s not always an easy one to recognize if our survival patterns are based on us NOT recognizing it.
This tends to be some of the most meaningful work I do with clients; the work of supporting women in becoming familiar with their own obstacles to basic nourishment.
We certainly discuss calories, meal timing, and macronutrients, but we also become curious about what emerges when a woman begins making herself someone worth feeding consistently — what throws off her day and her week when she’s prioritizing consistently nutrient-dense meals and snacks?
It’s important that we begin relating to ourselves as beings deserving of resources, attention, and care, and that we become accustomed to doing this before we’ve reached a point of depletion and burnout. This approach doesn’t mean that we’ll be perfect and eat the right foods all the time – I still don’t and I do this work for a living!
The point is that we know what matters, how we feel each day, we prioritize it, and we build our lives around nourishment, learning from what comes up along the way.
You Might Be Thinking: If Under-Eating Is Such a Big Problem, Why Are So Many People Overweight?
I think this is a reasonable question and I get it often, particularly because many of us grew up in a culture where the dominant conversation around food has centered around excess intake and the obvious health consequences of obesity, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome.
We’re often taught that modern people eat too much, move too little, and simply need more discipline.
Most of us have also been inundated with diet culture marketing our whole lives, and it’s second-nature for us to assume that if we all just ate less and practiced more control over what we ate (I have some agreement with this one, but its also not as simple as self-control), we would all be much healthier.
Certainly, there are segments of the population for whom excessive caloric intake relative to expenditure is contributing to poor health outcomes, and there are also large segments of the population who eat a diet of industrially processed foods, high in inflammatory and low nutrient things like seed oils, enriched flours, and corn syrup. These things are definitely contributing to poor health outcomes as a culture!
But I don’t think this necessarily contradicts what I’ve been describing here, and these patterns certainly don’t apply to most of the women who follow my work — including most of you reading this article! I actually believe that these two realities (malnourished through too many industrial foods AND under-eating overall) often coexist, sometimes in the same woman at different times.
I don’t believe most people become metabolically unhealthy after decades of being deeply nourished, well-rested, adequately resourced, socially connected, and living in alignment with their biological needs.
Many of us are attempting to navigate modern life within bodies that have been adapting to various forms of scarcity for years. Scarcity of:
- time (or time used well)
- rest
- community, intimacy, and meaningful connection
- micronutrients and quality foods
- pleasure, healthy and connected sexual expression, and oxytocin
- safety where it matters most and growth where it matters most
And, most importantly in the context of this article, we’re often living with perpetual scarcity in adequate energy intake.
When I think about women in particular, I don’t necessarily see widespread overeating as the opposite of malnourishment either. In fact, many times it may itself be a response to malnourishment, as it was for me for the decade-long struggle I had with bulimia and binge eating.
I was severely stressed and malnourished and would over-eat when my survival states reached pique levels, to where I couldn’t white-knuckle it anymore. But this doesn’t mean over-eating was the driving force in my problems. I had extreme sugar cravings that would hijack my focus, distract me from the rest of my life, and often led to impulsive eating behaviors I’d feel ashamed and stressed about afterwards. I was never overweight, so my behaviors weren’t viewed in the same light as they would’ve had I been, but it was never about will power or self-control for me — it was always about a starving malnourished brain and body!
I’m happy to say that I haven’t dealt with difficult or disruptive cravings in about a decade, and any time I feel a strong craving for something; sugar, carbs, fat, salt — I interpret it as an energy signal, and I listen!!
Many women I’ve worked with who struggled with their weight weren’t eating substantially more food than women whose weights remained stable, and most of the women in my life who’ve struggled with their weight weren’t objectively gluttonous, eating non-stop.
If anything, these women had spent years cycling through periods of restriction, intense exercise, dietary rules, and attempts to exert greater control over bodies that no longer seemed to regulate themselves with ease, and by the time I meet women with these patterns, they’re usually in their thirties, forties, or beyond, and they’re usually exhausted.
If this is your pattern too, please understand it’s likely that you’ve become increasingly dependent on external strategies to manage symptoms, body composition, or energy levels, often without realizing that the foundations supporting metabolism may have been compromised much earlier in life.
And if you find that you’re constantly hungry and craving specific things, this is a signal that your body needs more energy, or an improvement in your energy metabolism!
Being a healthy weight shouldn’t be a full-time job.
And perhaps this is one reason malnourishment is so difficult for many health-conscious women to recognize in themselves – because they’ve been making it a full-time job and all they see is their cravings, impulses, and any struggles with over-eating that they have.
When we hear the word malnourished, we tend to imagine famine, visible thinness, or severe deprivation; we don’t typically imagine women who shop at Whole Foods, buy organic produce, take supplements, and spend considerable amounts of money trying to optimize their health.
But over the years, I’ve watched some of the sickest and most health-conscious women I know regain vitality through something surprisingly simple — by learning how to eat enough.
By learning how to eat enough to finally convince their bodies that they no longer need to survive on stress hormones alone.
A Different Way of Thinking About Nourishment
If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this entire article, it’s that under-eating isn’t always obvious, and it may be a key driver in your struggles with health and fertility.
It doesn’t always look like visibly restricting food, skipping every meal, or intentionally trying to lose weight, even though these might be your set of patterns.
More often, the pattern of under-eating seems to emerge quietly over time as we adapt to modern living, misguided aesthetic goals, and to a sympathetic-dominant lifestyle.
We become accustomed to functioning on coffee, takeout, salads as meals, and, of course, stress hormones.
We normalize overriding our hunger signals because work needs to get done or we run out of food, or we don’t have access to the “clean” foods we prefer to eat. We also tend to get more cheap dopamine from screens and stimulants, and less oxytocin that used to come from the act of sharing meals with those we love — all of which can make eating less appealing over time.
And while nourishment through eating enough isn’t a cure-all for all the areas of our lives where there may be scarcity and mis-attunement, I increasingly think it creates conditions that allow many aspects of our health to improve naturally without as much force.
It’s honestly incredible to witness how much agency we can feel over various aspects of our lives when we actually have adequate energy in our bodies to function well!
When our bodies are adequately fed, we often sleep more deeply because our blood sugar is stable, we have enough nutrients in our systems to produce our rest-dependent chemicals, such as melatonin, thyroid, and progesterone, and we’re also more likely to tolerate stressors, as our overall capacity increases and the brain and body moves out of the contracted states caloric deficits keep us in.
We regulate our nervous systems more easily after difficult experiences when we’re properly nourished because we have the glucose, proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals to manage transitions from one energy demand to another.
A crucial result of consistent nourishment that I cannot emphasize enough is that we learn to trust our own appetites again.
And in general, we can often become less reactive to the world around us when we’re not in a chronic hangry state due to low blood sugar and excess cortisol pervading our experiences each day.
Downstream of our stress physiology, energy metabolism, blood sugar, thyroid, and immunity… are our menstrual cycles. I view our monthly cycles as report cards for the resilience of our overall health throughout the month, and when we’re eating well, our menstrual cycles often become more robust reflections of overall health rather than monthly reminders of how depleted we’ve become & how hard it is to be a depleted woman.
And perhaps most importantly, we gain an opportunity to practice relating to ourselves differently; not as bodies to control, fix, or outsmart, but as whole beings asking for proper prioritization and attunement. You’d think this was self-explanatory… but clearly it’s not because my business is based on helping women get back to this simple truth!
If This Resonates With You
One of the many reasons I love the work I do so much is because I know firsthand how difficult it can be to recognize under-nourishment in ourselves, particularly when we’ve spent years genuinely trying to be healthy, and struggling.
Here are a few general recommendations I have if you now suspect that you may be under-eating and under-nourished:
- Begin to track your overall caloric and macronutrient numbers! You can do this using an app like Chronometer or My Fitness Pal, or you can do this in a less systematic way through simply writing down your intake, along with things like meal times, how we feel before/after, and maybe even including images of meals!
- Download my reparative eating guide to get a sense of what foods I recommend and why.
- Look at your symptoms and your lifestyle to assess what these two might be telling you about your current intake.
- Get an HTMA and other nutrient panels to assess where your nutrients are at. And focus on getting the foods in to meet your nutrient needs before jumping to a supplement protocol!
- Set up alarms to ensure you’re eating every 3-4 hours and assess if this improves your overall health and vitality.
Sometimes we need another set of eyes to help us step back, ask more foundational questions, and observe our patterns more objectively, and I’m here to assist any women seeking a greater experience of self-nourishment who wants to get her body back into balance by simply eating more.
Together, we’ll look at your health history, your relationship to food, your current intake, your menstrual and fertility history, energy patterns, mineral status through HTMA, and any other labs or data that may help us better understand the landscape your body is currently navigating.
From there, we begin rebuilding nourishment from the ground up, starting with more food.
We’ll get you out of survival stress, even if those states have served you throughout life, because we cannot get healthy and normalize nourishment while simultaneously remaining stuck in survival physiology indefinitely.
My approach is food-first, trauma-informed, and deeply individualized because no two women arrive at under-eating and malnourishment for exactly the same reasons, have the same under-eating patterns, and no two women will rebuild nourishment in exactly the same way.
If you’ve been struggling with fatigue, hormonal symptoms, digestive issues, fertility concerns, poor sleep, low appetite, food intolerances, or simply the sense that your body feels increasingly high-maintenance despite years of doing everything right, you’d be shocked how connected all of these symptoms are, with malnourishment the underlying thread running through each one.
These patterns are going to be especially important if you’re reaching or into your perimenopausal years, where a natural decline in hormones and overall resources will exacerbate the depletion you may already live with each day.
I’d be happy to explore whether working together feels like a good fit, and you can schedule a complimentary consultation here if you’d like to chat. And if we’re a good fit, then I’d be honored to guide you into a more nourished version of yourself!
